%0 Journal Article
%T Genome empowerment for the Puerto Rican parrot ¨C Amazona vittata
%A Stephen J O¡¯Brien
%J GigaScience
%D 2012
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/2047-217x-1-13
%X Perhaps one of the more gratifying aspects of the post-genomics era is marveling at the creativity of individual projects that push the envelope further and further over the edge. Witness the emergence of human ¡°copy number variation¡± and discerning that their segmental aneuploidy might affect gene dosage and explain a few hereditary diseases (it does). Or 23andMe, the upstart SNP genotyping-for-the-people venture that began by predicting Oprah Winfrey¡¯s curious ancestry and now is immersed in personal medical genomics disclosure for an affordable price. Or this month¡¯s ENCODE bombshell that features some 4-million new gene regulatory sequence stretches amidst the sea of noncoding genomic DNA (98% of human DNA formerly dubbed ¡°junk DNA¡±; well hardly!) [1].An article published alongside this paper in GigaScience this month unfolds yet another novel genomics-stimulated innovation ¡ª a unique grassroots endeavor to sequence the genome of a critically endangered species from a remote locale where the species survives and is empowered by the local citizenry who wanted to help [2]. The Puerto Rican parrot¡¯s genome has been sequenced and assembled; annotation has commenced and the fresh new data (29-fold Illumina coverage) sits in an open access GigaScience database, GigaDB [3] and a genome browser for any party to query and improve. The work was led by Taras Oleksyk, Juan Carlo Martiez-Cruzado, along with a coterie of conservation minded scientists, and their students at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez ¨C not really a hotbed of genome sequencing centers.The Puerto Rican parrot is a uniquely American parrot, but one of eight parrot species found in the Caribbean (30 species comprise the 4 million years (MY) old-genus radiation in the Amazon region), a graphic example of speciation via island biogeography (Figure 1 and Figure 2). The species was listed as endangered by the US Fish and Wildlife Service in 1967 and as critically endangered by the International Union for
%K Puerto Rican parrot
%K Whole-genome sequencing
%K Genomics
%K Conservation
%K Education
%K Funding
%U http://www.gigasciencejournal.com/content/1/1/13